Transformational grammar explains how universal grammar characteristics transform into spoken words. Noam Chomsky introduced it in 1957 and it has evolved into the Minimalist Program. Deep structure represents sentence meaning, while surface structure is the spoken form. Generalized and structure-changing transformations modify sentences, and recursive rules provide methods for creating appropriate sentence structures without memorization.
Transformational grammar is a linguistic theory that expands on the claims made by universal grammar. While universal grammar states that all natural languages share some characteristics that are instinctual to all humans, transformational grammar names those characteristics and explains how they transform into spoken words. Applications of transformational grammar include learning the basic meaning of sentences, how words relate to each other, and how the same information can be framed in different ways.
Noam Chomsky published the first information on transformational grammar in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures. Many changes in theory and terminology have taken place since then. Most notable is the new area known as the Minimalist Program, which is a revised version of the original transformational grammar theory.
Deep structure, also known as logical form, represents the actual meaning of a sentence and can be the same in different languages. Chomsky represented deep structure by mapping the relationships between the words and sentences of a sentence on a sentence structure tree. This deep structure is never spoken.
A properly formed sentence in any language is known as a surface structure or phonetic form. Each sentence can have many forms due to various transformations using different syntax. Transformational grammar gets its name from these shape changes.
When the texture of the surface is changed or created, transformational grammar is applied. These transformations can be characterized as generalized or structure-modifying. Generalized transformations are those changes that combine thoughts from various deep structures into one surface structure. For example, some deep structures might be represented loosely as “Mary sees a dog”, “the dog barks” and “the barking is loud”. These deep structures could be modified and combined into “Mary sees a loud barking dog”.
Structure-changing transformations transform one type of sentence into another, such as active to passive or declarative to interrogative. The phrase “Joe saw a crocodile” could change to “what did Joe see?” or even “a crocodile was seen by Joe”. Readers often use structure-changing transformations to transform a complicated or old-fashioned sentence into one that is easily understood.
While there are an infinite number of appropriate sentence structures in any language, recursive rules provide methods for creating them without having to memorize the structures. A recursive rule is one that applies to your own response. For example, adding a preposition to a phrase results in a longer phrase, such as “the red chair in the corner”, instead of “the red chair”. Since the result is a noun phrase, another preposition could be added, such as “the red chair in the corner of the dining room”. Since the result is still a noun phrase, one could theoretically add an infinite number of prepositions and still have a correct noun phrase.
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